The opening of the $345 million Art of the Americas Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts this week represents but the latest — and the biggest — crest in a wave of new-museum construction in Boston that began unofficially with the opening of the new Institute of Contemporary Art building on Fan Pier in December 2007. Down the street from the MFA, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is in the midst of its own $114 million construction of a new wing by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Renzo Piano. (See photos from the June "Topping Ceremony" here.) Keeping a lower profile — except to its immediate mid-Cambridge neighbors — is the renovation (some might say reconstruction) of the Fogg Art Museum, also designed by Piano (cost as yet undisclosed).

But first things first. The Gardner began site preparation October 9. By late 2011, it expects to complete its new 70,000-square-foot wing, which would then open to the public in early 2012. (The total area of the original 1903 building is 60,000 square feet.)

As of a few weeks ago, the major features of the Gardner were coming clearly into view. The Gardner has always been limited by the stipulation in Mrs. Gardner's will that, in essence, each object in the museum must remain where she left it. Special exhibitions were always limited to a 500-square-foot gallery. The special-exhibition gallery in the new wing will be a three-story, 1500-foot room with full-length north-facing windows and adjustable ceiling, plus a small, 500-foot ante-room. The old entrance will be closed; the new one, on Evans Way, will lead into a more spacious lobby. The new wing will also include a "Living Room" orientation area, a restaurant, a gift shop, new greenhouses, and two artist residences on the second floor with atelier-like windows.

But the jewel of the new wing will be its 296-seat concert hall. Last year, when Piano spoke at the museum, it seemed that this was his main incentive for taking the job. Its capacity will be about the same as that of the Tapestry Room, the site of concerts in the historic building. But that long hall, though attractive and intimate, was never ideal for concerts — especially if you were seated more than 20 rows back. The new concert hall will have its performers in the center, surrounded by the audience on all four sides, with two rows of seats on the first floor topped by three single-row balconies.

The situation at what are now being called "the Harvard University Art Museums" is more complicated. In February 2006, Harvard announced a "comprehensive academic plan to transform facilities for teaching, research, and presentation of its renowned collections." Most immediately, that meant a complete renovation of the Fogg Art Museum building at 32 Quincy Street, which was constructed in 1927. What casual observers probably didn't realize was that this also meant the demolition of Otto Werner Hall, the adjoining structure that since 1991 had housed the collection of the former Busch-Reisinger Museum on Kirkland Street.

The Fogg has officially been closed since June 2008, during which time its various collections have been represented in the Sackler Museum down the block on Broadway.

Alternative universe In the 1930s and '40s, Boston painters developed a moody, mythic realism. They mixed social satire with depictions of street scenes, Biblical scenes, and mystical symbolic narratives, all of it darkened by the shadow of the Great Depression and World War II.

52 ways to leave 2009 Your usual lackadaisical approach to New Year's Eve — just see what happens and go with the flow — is not going to cut it this year. Sure, the end of this decade may not have the same kind of new-millennium pressure riding on it as the last one, but the plunge into 2010 is a milestone nonetheless.

Fresh fruit and vegetables The bleakest months of New England winter are ahead of us, so the prospect of leaving your toasty house to see art may not be at the top of your to-do list.

Bon appétit! Luis Meléndez himself greets you at the outset of "Luis Meléndez: Master of the Spanish Still Life" at the Museum of Fine Arts. He seems a haughty 31-year-old in this 1746 self-portrait, standing in a fine silk coat and ruffled shirt and holding up a chalk drawing (note the chalk in his hand) of a hunky nude dude.

Purposeful randomness "How do I absorb all this beauty," Leslie Schomp writes in Diary (2010), an open cloth notebook resting on a wood stand.

A walk on the wild side Everyone looks so weary in Howard Yezerski Gallery's gritty documentary photos of Boston's dear departed Combat Zone from 1969 to 1978. The year's still young, but this glimpse into our past from Roswell Angier, Jerry Berndt, and John Goodman may be one of the best shows of 2010.

Subject bias "Objects of Wonder" is a mixed bag of a show, which is what it sets out to be.

The outside world For some time now, Providence artist Adrianne Evans has been mulling natural processes in her art.

Ravishing beauty The wreckage at the end of Modernist art's main thrust is the starting point for "Pat Steir: Drawing Out of Line," a four-decade retrospective of the New Yorker's drawings at the RISD Museum.

FRED HERSCH TRIO AT SCULLERS | March 01, 2013 Fred Hersch's output as a composer includes an orchestrated setting of poems from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass as well as other art-song fare for singers.

THIS SPRING'S JAZZ &AMP; WORLD MUSIC SHOWS | February 28, 2013 The saxophonist Chris Potter started drawing attention when he joined the group of legendary bebop trumpeter Red Rodney as an 18-year-old Manhattan School of Music student.